Dark roads will cool these warm bodies
by glossary
Summary: In a world where the touch of your soulmate leaves colours on your skin, Ichigo holds a dead girl's hand. And nothing happens.


**disclaimer:** bleach © kubo tite.

* * *

The imprint of fingers around your throat, flowers tattooed down the curve of your spine, hands freckled with the night sky – that's love.

Ichigo is the kind of pretty child old women stoop down on the sidewalk to coo over, heavy perfume and sticky lipstick on his cheek. Afterwards his mother picks him up and kisses his forehead, and in her arms he feels safe down to the marrow of his bones. She's got the kind of dimples that make you want to smile back, and a perpetually kiss-pink mouth that speaks only kindness, unfaltering and true.

"They think you're cute," she explains. "That's why they want to fuss a little, you see?"

"They're like Daddy," he replies, which makes her laugh from that place deep in her belly.

"Yes," she says. "Exactly like Daddy."

He's a beautiful child but he's a sullen middle schooler, scabbed knees and scratched elbows, hair in desperate need of a trim. Bruised knuckles. Attitude razor sharp. He grows into a teenager with coltish grace, lean-boned edging on skinny, deceivingly strong under the tight clothes. Knobby ankles. A shock of reddish hair and long lashes and a sulky mouth, miles and miles of tanned golden skin like the first flush of sunset in summer, and not a mark in sight.

That's tragedy.

 **DARK ROADS WILL COOL THESE WARM BODIES**

And like every pain ever felt, one day the worst happens: he gets used to it.

A girl falls in love with Ichigo the first day of elementary school. She's unremarkable in the grand scheme of things, and will go on to live a quiet life full of understated happiness, but for now: she's the first girl to go weak at the knees at the sight of his stupid scowl. He doesn't return her affection, is uncomfortable with her mumbling voice whenever they talk, dislikes the fevered glances she shoots him when she thinks he's not looking. Her small hand trying to reach for his in a mad moment of bravery…

"She has a crush on you," Mum tells him. His father is chopping carrots loudly for dinner, pretending he's not listening but quite obviously laughing his ass off. His mother smiles – one corner of her mother higher than the other. That pretty dimple. "It's normal for little girls to have crushes, Ichigo. I'm afraid you'll have to weather it."

He's unsatisfied with this answer. "But has she got to have a crush on _me_?" he demands.

His father cracks up.

"It's not a matter of choosing," Mum says. "It would be easier, certainly, if we could pick precisely whom our hearts like best, but…" She glances over her shoulder at Dad, who grins his roguish grin. "She certainly doesn't have bad taste, this little girl," she continues smoothly, touching her pink cheek. "My baby is the cutest, isn't he?"

" _Mum_ …"

Yuzu, two years old and gloriously chubby cheeked, chooses that moment to call triumphantly, "Cute!" Her partner-in-crime, tiny Karin standing sullenly in her one and only dress, shakes her rattle menacingly. Their father makes a strangled noise and runs out of the room to pick up the camera while their mother gathers all three of her children close, close enough they can smell her perfume, and they unanimously dissolve into a shower of giggling while she says, "That's right! My babies are all the cutest!"

The next day the girl shows up at school with three butterflies on the right side of her face. They're an explosion of colour, one covering her temple and her eyelid, another open and vibrant on her cheek, and the last one low on her jaw, almost hidden by her hair. When she blinks for a moment you can appreciate the whole picture and―it's an experience, mint green and peach pink and glittery orange drawing graceful lines, shadowed with electric blue and sparkling yellow. You don't have to be a genius to recognise happiness.

Their classmates swarm around her as soon as they're able, bursting into waves and waves of questions because they're young enough it's still permissible. The girl doesn't seem to mind, unfolds a smile that glows it's so bright and tells them about the family that moved next door, and the pale-faced middle schooler girl who'd tucked her hair behind her ear while their mothers chattered, about to say _my, what a cute little girl_ only to swallow her words under the shower of colour.

She looks at Ichigo and there's something faintly apologetic about her expression – about the set of her mouth, which seems oddly mature and faraway, like she's seen something wondrous that has changed her forever and is sorry to leave him behind. He's ready to be angry about that – what, like he cares she hasn't got a crush on him any longer – but that, the way her savage happiness hides a pink sadness, it makes him stop for a second. Just a second.

His mum's never had any butterflies. Not that it matters, of course. (You can't live your life waiting for the moment your soul begins to leak out. That's not how it works.) But there are certain expectations and - close your eyes and dream about a world where you do not hurt, are never lonely. There is one person in the world who will understand you. Even if they don't love you. Even if they don't like you. Even if they hate you with the heat of a bone-melting blaze. They will understand you.

Now open your eyes and look at the boy with the cute hair in your homeroom class.

They say there's always a choice but that's not true. Butterflies on your face and you don't belong to yourself, not really. Ichigo imagines the girl's new neighbour holding a heart in her hand, ready to crush it or love it or both and his mouth tastes like liquorice, which he hates.

His mother is grading papers in her room, sitting with her ankles crossed and a red pen tucked behind her ear. Hair pinned up in a bun. Glasses. She's back to giving courses at the local community college since Yuzu and Karin go to day care half-day, although only online ones. Ichigo climbs onto the bed, accidentally crumpling somebody's paper. His mother allows him to cuddle up to her without saying a word. When he touches the inside of her elbow her veins, a pale lavender shade, darken to the blue-purple of an old bruise – luminescence, they call it (only he won't remember the word for a few more years): the aftereffects of the splintering, the moment where her soul had shattered to plant the seed of his.

(You can't live your life waiting for the moment your soul begins to leak out. You've got a heart before you bleed and you'll have a heart after, too.)

"Mum," he says, voice muffled because he's buried his head into her side. "What's a soulmate?"

The scratch of her pen and her ribs inhaling-exhaling and a bird trilling, outside.

"Who are you, my love?"

He's confused. "I'm Ichigo."

"Ah." A huff of laughter. "And who is Kurosaki Ichigo?"

(By the way, don't ask existential questions to your children.)

The first time he feels the uneven edges of the earth under his feet. Who is Kurosaki Ichigo? Six years old, redhead, has two little sisters. A mother and a father who wash the dishes together after dinner and sometimes his father makes his mother laugh so hard she can't breathe and her knees will go weak and his dad'll have to catch her and spin her about and Yuzu will run from the living room to chase them, "Wan' dance too da'!" while Karin lies face-down in front of the TV like a dead slug.

Happiness.

Who is Kurosaki Ichigo?

The shocking answer: "I don't know."

"When you know," she says, "then you'll get your answer."

Japan is a modest country, full of modest people.

Brazil. Two women kiss each other at sunset. The air is green and singing, the last sun of the day hot on their skin. One of them is dark-skinned and liquid-eyed. The other has a mouth so red her lips look like cherries. A Korean teenage girl on holiday takes out her phone to record them and six hours later the whole world has seen that pale hand ripping shooting stars out of her lover's spine. The jut of bone underneath skin as tight as a drum – like wings, like love.

In Ireland a girl bares her throat to show off the mark of fingerprints. The hint of a palm dipping into the hollow of her collarbone. Strong fingers hugging the fragile curve of her neck. She has her hair pulled up but her eyes are looking down, just barely, shy in her flustered happiness. In the background: her room, walls painted mint green, with its unmade bed and its open window and stacks and stacks of CDs.

There's a video going around of a Mexican boy. He looks too young to be that full of fire, tumbling curls and flashing eyes and clever ankles. His shirt is loose and faded, trousers low on his hips and as he dances his clothes shift as waves might. Almost all his visible skin looks underlined with the image of a skeleton, as if it has turned translucent so you can glimpse the truth – his mouth is serious and his hair glossy but he has the grin of a skull drawn on his cheeks, all teeth and fierceness. (An old, old woman in Russian watches it, holding her granddaughter's hand, and cries without making a sound. But that's another story.)

They're more brave in USA – in San Francisco, for the pride parades, some people march stark naked and glorious. _Love is love is love_. The posters announcing the date have been the same for ages but nobody can resist the pure simplicity of it: a young human being, the right side of their face adorned with long glossy curls and peach-soft lipstick (a girl in Iowa wants to learn to apply eyeliner with half that sharpness), the left side harder, more masculine, hair cut too short to grab and the kind of flushed mouth that makes you think things, imagine things, want―

In England, old nobility offers a hand like a soldier cocking a gun. Be careful where you point, but if you do shoot me then gun me down and don't let me get up. Anchor me to you. Adore me. Fear me. Need me.

(A paper written in 1678 by an old German man who lost his soulmate three days after meeting her: _Empty ― a treatise on the unmatched_.)

But in Japan… Orihime and Hikoboshi meet only once a year, and only if the sky is clear. Affection is the flower with petals like glass at the top of the mountain, or the monster who visited your grandfather's tiny country village ages and ages ago and left your bloodline with a spark of _more_.

Too precious to be looked at directly.

And then his mother dies. They stop washing dishes.

Close your eyes. Think about sadness. It's not misery – Ichigo is young and there is hushed loneliness but there is also time, days and days and days where there is nothing to do except get used to a cold quiet house. It merely lingers, like in the absence of her perfume emptiness pours itself into the rooms, pools like quicksilver under their beds. He opens the cupboard and misses her, finds her favourite hair tie in the bathroom and aches, shatters. Stumbles on.

He gets older. His body loses the baby fat – everything soft begins to sharpen clumsily, unsteadily, like a trembling hand unsheathing a knife. Ichigo doesn't think about it often―not about soulmates, and definitely not about _who are you?_ Sometimes people appear with their hands dusted full of leaves of grass, and for a few days they hold everything as if the world has been remade anew only for them, light and precious. And then you wake up one morning and you still don't have a job, or you're still too poor to afford lunch, or you're still dying of cancer.

The sun rises every morning and the stars gleam like pearls every night and the end of every summer will make you mildly sad, no doubt about it. His father never marries again.

He meets Chad towards the end of middle school, tall and quiet and with the same unshakable serenity that Yuzu has – not weakness, but a sort of precise surety of their place in the world, and a soft-edged determination to do their best. Ichigo likes him instantly, his dark skin and long hair and strong hands. The steadiness of his silence, how he never makes a big deal out of his own lack of a soulmate. His fists closing carefully, ready to fight at his side.

Is it really so bad, to not be whole?

The first day of high school he glances at his newest classmates. They're too old to go around with their faces flushed full of love, of course, but fingers and wrists - the flutter of blue feathers, golden-white owls perching themselves to fly away, the warm glint of sunlight on water, a black cat. A girl raises her hand while the professor is doing roll call and her sleeve trails down her arm to reveal the solar system, the bright yellow of the sun and the thriving green of earth and Jupiter's moons - her skin underneath it like a ready canvas. Somebody out there thinking the universe of her.

Life goes on. Only ghosts remain the same. The dead can't change.

The silence begins to break. Yuzu makes a kingdom out of the kitchen, hearth as heart and home, and Karin brings a pack of dirty boys for dinner. (His dad enjoys torturing them by asking which one will become his son-in-law.) Ichigo meets people and slowly they linger around him: Keigo, who clings close to anyone who'll have them; Mizuiro, whose attention holds a distant warmth… Tatsuki comes back into orbit and holding her hand comes Inoue Orihime, who has the kind of evergreen beauty that will never fade. Her hair is the shade of autumn leaves, her laughter spills over like seafoam.

Her gaze meets his shyly, at first. He remembers her. Worse: he remembers her carefully pressed middle schooler skirt and her skinned knee and the way she had carried her brother on her back and how his bloody hands had left a daisy ring around her neck and the way she'd sounded as she asked for help. Like everything inside her had gone quiet.

"I was so happy when I met Tatsuki," she tells him, utterly unprompted. Red creeps up her neck—embarrassed like that, her unearthly loveliness fades and she just looks unsure and fifteen, an earnest girl. "I'd had my brother since I was little and sometimes I worried, what if we never did anything interesting because we already had each other so close? What if we just grew around each other until we didn't know how to be on our own? He—" She bites her lip and bows her head. "He raised me, you know? And then I met Tatsuki and for a little bit I felt such happiness, and then my brother died, and I wondered…" Tears well up and fall, and she scrubs her face gracelessly but marches on: "I wondered if… God was punishing me, for having that sort of thought… Was I too arrogant? Was I too happy? Because you know, sometimes I woke up and I thought of my brother and Tatsuki and I worried I'd explode after feeling so _good_ , but I—"

They look at each other. Ichigo feels his heart in his throat like an apple slice he can't swallow right.

"But we can't know what God thinks, can we, Kurosaki?" she says. As gently as a spring river. "I still think about my brother a lot. I've told Tatsuki everything about him, haha! Just in case. Just so I don't forget anything ever. Tatsuki's so smart, you know? So thank you, Kurosaki. Please give my thanks to your father as well. Thank you for making me tea while my brother died."

Ichigo watches her go. Chad finds him with his eyes closed beneath a tree, splayed out like a starfish.

"Okay?" asks Chad.

"Yeah," says Ichigo. Inoue never met a shade of awkwardness she didn't want to shoot in the face, that's all.

He thinks about the things he'll say to his mother when he dies. He figures he'll be old so he's got to keep the record straight from now on. Bare skin and loneliness and how those two things have nothing to do with the other. The weird bitter tea Chad likes and Tatsuki having the time of her life trying to beat the shit out of him. Yuzu's red velvet cake, Karin's football matches… His dad's dumb poster where she looks like an idol. Those unbearable hot summer days where she used to drink scalding coffee and read a book and how she'd let him try a sip and the bitterness would linger for hours and how he hasn't forgotten a single thing.

The shadow of her absence is unending. He doesn't feel much of anything until the day a weird girl breaks into his room, saying she's hunting a monster. They touch hands, and…

Nothing happens.

* * *

 **notes:**  
1\. i started writing this thing like three years ago. count them: THREE (3) years ago  
2\. am i the world's laziest writer? it's more likely than you think  
3\. btw this might look angsty or whatever but that's just bc ichigo graduated from the hp school of Drama  
4\. this is a _romance_


End file.
